24 February 2011 4:21 PM

The goldfish syndrome

Do goldfish know that they are wet, or even that they are in water, or (when they are in one) in a bowl? I doubt it. I imagine that they never consider these things. They just think that what is, is - and that it ought to be so, and always will be so. They only ever meet other goldfish who have the same view. They have powerful mental defences against considering any alternative.

BBC persons are similar. From their Oxbridge Junior Common Rooms to the sad day when their friends gather to say farewell at the crematorium, they never meet anyone who disagrees with them, except for contemptible outsiders who they can safely dismiss as unimportant or stupid or 'fascist'. Just as the poor bewildered fish doesn't know he is wet, they just cannot understand that they are biased. And the revelation of the truth can only come at some cost - fear of the dry, waterless, bowl-free world beyond, in which survival might be in doubt.

I constantly encounter this difficulty. My recent dispute with the 'Feedback' programme (see the index under BBC' and 'BBC Bias') was an instance of it. They didn't have any idea that their treatment of me had been, itself, biased - until I told them so and rather vigorously petitioned them for justice.

The latest instance is in a contribution from a Mr Stephen Finn (on the 'Why Jeremy Paxman Might Not Be a conservative' thread), who says he has worked for the BBC. It is in many ways so perfect an example of the type that I am tempted to have it stuffed and put in a glass case. This posting is an extension of my reply to Mr Finn.

Mr Finn says he can answer my question: "Can anyone remember him [Jeremy Paxman] interviewing a Blair-era Labour minister in a similarly hostile fashion, from the position of a *conservative* Devil’s advocate?"Mr Finn says :"Yes, many times. I'm sure we all can. "

Well, I thought here we were going to be referred to at least some of these 'many times' and told when they were, and involving whom, perhaps with some indicative quotations. But they don't seem to be there - which doesn't greatly surprise me.

Because, you see, I'm not sure we 'all can' remember anything of the kind ever taking place. I for one cannot recall a single instance of this. I can, by contrast, clearly recall Mr Paxman treating William Hague (as Leader of the Opposition, mind you) with weary disdain when Mr Hague had been stabbed in the back by Lord Cranborne over House of Lords reform and was trying to defend his position. Mr Paxman actually offered to hand over the questioning to a Labour minister, also present in the studio (who wisely declined the offer).

I thought then, and think still, that this action was one of the most significant moments in modern British broadcasting. In the years after May 1997 the BBC, which had been furiously adversarial towards the Thatcher and Major governments (notably concentrating on Tory splits over the EU during the election campaign, while making no balancing effort to examine faultlines within New Labour) were simply unable to adopt a similar stance towards the Blair government. They could and did attack it from the Left (on civil liberty, economic policy etc) but they lacked the intellectual artillery or ammunition or personnel to attack it from a conservative position.

This was partly for the reasons given by Mark Thompson, who has conceded the existence of a left-wing bias 'in the 1980s' which has somehow disappeared in the years since, or by Andrew Marr, who memorably said that the BBC is "a publicly-funded urban organisation with an abnormally large proportion of younger people, of people in ethnic minorities and almost certainly of gay people, compared with the population at large". All this, he said, "creates an innate liberal bias inside the BBC".

The problem arose only partly because of this difficulty. The liberal bias also has a huge effect on recruitment, training and promotion. Thus by 1997, the BBC had almost no major figures in the Presenterocracy (or anywhere else much) who weren't instinctively radical. The BBC's treatment of distinguished journalists who weren't in the club, such as Jeff Randall and Andrew Neil, is very interesting. Mr Randall has described the baffled hostility he encountered. Mr Neil, it seems to me, is forever limited to late-night or daytime programmes. He is by all measures a superb broadcaster, quite qualified to present 'Newsnight' or any of the major flagship radio programmes. But somehow this doesn't happen. I might add that neither Mr Randall nor Mr Neil strike me as being particularly socially conservative, tending more towards the economically liberal view of domestic policy.

The BBC only became adversarial towards Labour, in the form of the doomed Brown government, after the Tories (first neutralised by Michael Howard, then actually subject to a sort of political gender reassignment under David Cameron) had adopted the radical programme of Blairism (as discussed in my book 'The Cameron Delusion'). They could then be safely supported, as the Blairite heritage of political correctness and radical constitutional change, not to mention the holy NHS and the comprehensive school system, were safe in their hands.

Mr Finn continues: "Speaking as someone who has worked in a BBC newsroom I can only say that in my experience the BBC are fanatical about balance in news broadcasting. That view may be unpopular here but it happens to be true. "

Mr Finn suffers from the standard BBC mental blockage on this subject. He mistakes formal balance between political parties (which is sort of achievable) for real impartiality between two points of view ( which, because it requires a thinking, informed person to be a neutered nullity, is beyond the wit of man and unbearable for any red-blooded human).

And because his world would fall down around him if he ventured outside this tiny, safe and irrelevant magic circle, he misses the whole point of what I am saying.

I recall with joy a conversation with the late BBC veteran Vincent Hanna, a fine journalist and undoubted left-winger, who used to take a savage delight in pursuing any BBC person who ever showed any signs of *party* affiliation. I asked him if he had never himself had any political affiliation in this country. No, he said, he'd once been a member of the Northern Ireland Labour Party, but that didn't count. I pointed out to him that this assertion was itself doubly contentious, and said something quite important about his views on several subjects. He wasn't all that amused.

The BBC is indeed scrupulous to the point of physical pain in ensuring that fair amounts of time are given to the major parties, according to agonisingly detailed formulae. This is mathematically possible, though difficult, and I am sure they feel very virtuous about it.

However, it is wholly ineffectual even in this narrow field because it does not deal with the following:

*How much space to give to lesser parties which did not earn any coverage through their votes at the last election, but which may now have a considerable potential vote which may be affected by the tone and quantity of coverage given to them.

*The advantage which can be given to the government (but isn't always) through use of the 'sandwich' - in which the reporter outlines the controversy between the parties with reasonable fairness, but then adds that 'government sources' or some other anonymous thing, take a particular view or expect a certain outcome or adopt a certain interpretation of the facts. These unnamed sources or 'experts' are a device by which the government (if it is in favour) or the opposition (if it is in favour) may be given the best of the argument without anyone needing to step off the plinth marked 'impartial reporting'. Once you are aware of this method, you'll see it all the time. But most people aren't, so they are manipulated by it - and editors at the BBC are often very lax in controlling it.

*The use of loaded verbs such as 'claims' instead of 'said' (this happens all the time, and was applied on a BBC news report on Thursday night to a statement made by the Prime Minister). No BBC reporter, committed by Charter to impartiality, is entitled to cast doubt on the veracity of any statement made by any legitimate politician in good faith in this way. Yet they do it all the time.

*The use of tone or expression of voice, the giving of the last word, the angling of questions, the control (or lack of it) of facial expression (I remember the ecstatic grin on the face of one BBC journalist, now a prominent newsreader, on election night in May 1997 as the news of Labour's victory became clear).

Once we move from direct politics into the hundreds of other areas of contention, from immigration and the EU to man-made global warming, the sexual revolution, exam inflation, Israel versus the Arabs, Northern Ireland, religion versus secularism, capital punishment, gun control, the nature of American society, and so forth, the formula simply cannot apply as the parties often aren't divided on these matters. But the population, which pays the licence fee, is divided. And it is in these matters that the BBC endlessly demonstrates its bias by selection of presenter, choice of angle, time given to particular subjects and not given to others (to be sure, Roman Catholic priestly sexual abuse is important, and there's some interest in homosexual priests and bishops, but BBC religious affairs programmes concentrate on these subjects to the exclusion of, or minimisation of many equally interesting and important religious topics).

Nor is this problem confined to news and current affairs programmes. Woman's Hour, the Archers, the News Quiz, Have I Got News For You, all contain many instances of partiality in non-partisan but important and contentious matters.

The origin of the current discussion on this is the reprimanding of Mr Paxman for an article in the Guardian. The reprimand was futile and ineffectual - Mr Paxman's article can have surprised nobody. Why should we pretend that we didn't know this was what he thought? The whole presumption on which the incident was based was the absurd one which Mr Finn defends - that policing explicit political bias is any answer to charges of deep cultural, moral and social implicit bias. It isn't. Can we return to that?

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A broadcasting organisation which is supposed to be impartial is in no postionto 'attack' any political postion.

Nor is it in a position to espouse any thoroughly political stance such as multiclturalism. Yet that is what ta senior BBC affirmed as its postion when a complint about mu;toicu'tora; bias was made to it by Jeff Randall. who was then working for the BBC,

That the BBC can do this is absolutely outrageous - one of the great scandals of our times which badly needs to be sorted out.

I personally feel since, as Mr Hitchens remarks, objectivity is impssible, that broadcasters should be allowed to adopt overtly political postions and indeed should be made to announce them, so that this hiding behind ludicrousley false protestationsof impartiality diappears.

I don't actually have 'problems' in a personal sense, but rather I think that the nation does or may at some point in the future, for instance in the event of the Muslim population becoming a majority or comprising half the population (as they surely will on present demographic trends).

My position is partly pre-emptive (on issues such as immigration and educational decline), not borne out of some form of personal desperation (a common conceit regularly used by the Left to try and dismiss support for the Right).

I think that a unification of the BNP and UKIP would be a marvelous idea, but unlikely to happen, not least because of the UKIP leadership. My broad point was that voters should support parties which represent certain policies, and try to move away from party brands, which I feel are merely a device to frustrate the democratic process. Indeed, I feel that large parts of government machinery could be dispensed with altogether if we adopted the Scandinavian model of compulsory referenda on all the major issues, but pigs may fly . . .

This would have to be done by parliament, but as parliament does nothing about social worker abuses of power, or our justice system being pro-crime, or mass immigration, or borrowing money to send foreign ‘aid’ to our enemies, or siding with the judiciary who claim it is they who decide if we should go to war and not the Prime Minister and the cabinet, or doing nothing about our judiciary threatening Israeli diplomats with arrest if they visit Britain, as if it is they who are in charge of diplomatic affairs – if parliament is made up of the kind of people who do nothing about these outrages, they are hardly likely to do anything about BBC bias. Especially as most of them would lose their job if we had an unbiased media, and the voters had it brought to their attention that they have been voting for MPs with the opposite views to their own for several decades.

Eric Johnson's post reminds me of some others but I have never heard johntee's before.

My point was that you often appear to suggest the UKIP/BNP have all the answers to your problems. As they both appear to be making little progress in their role as the voice of the Right, my question was why do they not unite under a common banner?

I admit Alan, it is necessary to remain eternally vigilant for signs of complacency, even in oneself! Treason and capital punishment - I think I've dealt with these topics already, although I accept they are related areas.

Sorry I can't possibly respond to every exchange, I would never get away. What was your point again?!

The BBC is a chronically biased organisation which should be taken to court, and those responsible should recieve lengthy jail terms. Failing that, the organization should be closed down (unfortunate I know, as it used to produce programmes which were the envy of the world).

It is a henious crime for a small gaggle of Marxists, brainwashed at university, to have seized control of this once proud institution and to have subverted it for political propoganda purposes.

Surely, we are in a pretty pass when the political agenda of the nation is set, rather than reflected, by the BBC. Rather than pursuing excellence, it's sole agenda seems to be political correctness - making sure the 'correct' numbers of women, ethnic minorities and gays are (over) represented (as, in the latter 2 cases, they only comprise a very small percentage of the population)

No, get rid of it and get rid of it as soon as possible! Sentence the guilty!

I do not say that the person I imagine - who could be Irish or English - has all that worked out and worded, but it is a powerful instinct. And I do welcome that this kind of attitude has come along with the marginal decline of other “attitudes”: amongst them, in Ireland, hatred of England. These atavisms are said to be constant potentialities in the human breast. Let me say that, when I still feel like I am starting out on life’s road, that is too painful to contemplate. Let me also say that if it is true that these atavisms are always there, then we really are in the position of being “created sick and commanded to be well.” Sorry to say it.

Larkin wrote, “My life is for me, as well ignore gravity.” As a middle class young man, who has tried not to be irresponsible, who has recently found out that he has been rather badly failed over the years by some of those mental-health professionals (also middle-class) you are so instructively suspicious of, it is a real question for me whether it is worth bothering to uphold our social order. (I do not say, the personal is political, but politics are personal.) One of the side issues of the election here is a proposal that Irish not be kept on as a compulsory subject. I feel I have been dunked down among madmen in this country, and would like to preserve all kinds of freedom possible at all costs. Why should it be compulsory? (And there is no doubt that it does have a “binding” role, even among those who cannot speak it.) Yeats wrote, “In Ireland I am constantly reminded of that fable of the futility of all discipline that is not of the whole being.”

In parting I just wish to add that you have been quoting Allan Bloom recently, but his compatriot and native of the same year, Harold Bloom is a better commentator, especially on religion. (This is not to subscribe everything he says, naturally.) All the best. If the above sounds cold, it is warmly meant.

That is a dubious statement, they certainly did exist at one time though whether they are still in operation I couldn't say. For reasons which I won't go into, every television set has a local oscillator there's nothing sinister about that - it's the way they work, and this oscillator transmits a low power signal and this can be detected and pinpointed with the right equipment.

Let's face facts. The reason that so many people here have a problem with the BBC is not because it is biased to the left but that it is not biased to the right. No Stephen Finn, you are wrong. If the BBC was a private entity, then it would be quite within it's rights to report from as far left (or right) as it wished. As it is - in effect - a publically owned organisation, it has a duty to reflect the views of all people across the political spectrum. My views lie some place to the right of 'Hard right' but stop quite short of being 'Extreme right' but I would still prefer the BBC to be impartial than to be biased IN FAVOUR of my own political outlook.

I make these comments in part as a happy Irishman (no kind of Irish nationalist), as a young man, a middle-class person, as one raised by lapsed, or anyway non-communicant Catholic parents, but also just as myself…

I believe it is fair to say that you have a certain misery before the modern world, which might be defined as the ascendancy of liberalism, as opposed to “liberty and order.” I share it to an extent, and have been interested in you and others as at least giving alternatives to being “Distracted from distraction by distraction.” (Though Eliot is not a great hero of mine.) Above all, I think I recognise your description of a world where everyone is increasingly busy, and bought off by the cheapness of consumer durables and clothing.

My position as an Irishman might seem to lessen the relevance to you of what I have to say, but only if one lessens one’s consciousness of the world, of what there is in the world, which may be one of the more dangerous things one can do.

When you quote the lines beginning “O Almighty God who alone canst order unruly wills and affections of sinful men,” I do recognise the truth in it, and indeed I believe in grace. But if I were to transpose much of the argument on behalf of organised religion to Ireland, I would end with apologias for the Catholic Church. Again this might seem like a misfortune peculiar to Ireland, a state in the past defined by confessionalism, and of no relevance to you. But though I recognise the ultimate difference between Protestantism and Catholicism, and in fact greatly admire Protestantism and the emphasis on conscience, a better basis for a humane settled order, I would still sympathise with a modern Englishman who doesn’t “want to be told what to think.”

It is true that he and I can think as we wish, even as religious people; and also that as modern people we are under the gravitational pull of a million useless ideas, which we are in effect told to think. Those ideas are in the ether; we would have to go to a church to hear the other ones. Still, we know what is meant when an irreligious person says they do not want to be told to think: not just that they want to be told what to do, how to behave; but also what the world consists of, whether there should be a slight twinge of guilt attached to the enjoyment of “the profane.”

'Tarquin' asks if there is any clue that Andrew Neil wants to be on the radio. Well, he certainly used to present a very good radio programme, I think on BBC Radio 5 on Sunday mornings, the demise of which was much regretted by many. Perhaps someone should ask him?

About Andrew Neil being in late-night or daytime slots, I have to ask - when are the better positioned political shows?

Newsnight is about it, as far as I can see, almost all political discussion is relegated to daytime or beyond 10pm..and that goes for Newsnight as well

Neil recently fronted a documentary that strongly favoured grammar schools (or selective schooling), covers all the elections and is on our tv screens everyday, including for PMQs, about the only time any member of the public watches parliament - is there any clue that he even wants to be on the radio

Unlike your correspondent Mr Finn I actually did work for the BBC albeit as a lowly Broadcast Journalist on local radio. After I had recovered from the shock of discovering that Auntie was not, as I had originally believed, a paragon of impartiality I soon smelled an even bigger rat.

The Labour city council on my patch had for a long time been synonymous with profligacy, extravagant misuse of funds and general waste of council tax payers' money. All of this went totally unreported by my local station.

After £40 million of New Deal money was frittered away by a local community on "consultants", "outreach workers" and "facilitators" to no discernible benefit to anyone I thought that even my station editor would sit up and take notice. Fat chance. The reason?

This may be coincidence but after a cursory investigations it transpires that the editor in question is a graduate of the shadowy Marxian group "Common Purpose". I believe that there may be a connection.

Dear Mr Hitchens,
You have put your finger on the issue: most BBC producers do not realise that they are prejudiced.

Example 1: As an ordinary citizen, I have average racial and social prejudices. I know that, so I can allow for it, if necessary by joshing myself. This is sometimes called humility but actually requires a certain arrogance.

Example 2: Vincent Hanna was also a dear and much-missed friend of mine. He was emotionally pretty straight left-wing libertarian, stemming from his Nationalist upbringing in Northern Ireland. But he was intelligent and confident enough to separate this from his independent role as a challenging journalist. This was sometimes seen as cynicism: it was actually professionalism.

Example 3: An exception that proves your rule. Edwina Currie once had a late-night chat show on Radio 5. When she was away, Labour left-winger Austen Mitchell MP stood in. Currie tediously repeated the mantra that she was no longer political, then proceeded to indulge her prejudices and biases. Mitchell, knowing who he was, operated as a proper neutral journalist.

Peter Hitchens says "Just as the poor bewildered fish doesn't know he is wet, they just cannot understand that they are biased."

The BBC people know that most of their their causes, such as crime, drugs, attacking our culture, mass immigration, and making inadequate provision for our energy needs, are contrary to the grain and against the way most people think. So they know they can only do their bit to persuade the people to take the path of misery and national suicide by using deceit and bias.

So you cannot hope that if only they realised they were biased they would stop. They need bias to promote their views, as a fish needs water, and the only time they reduce the bias is not out of recognition that they have been biased and regret it, rather it is when the great mass of people start to frown at them, like they did after the biased Feedback programme against Peter Hitchens, where he was not present. In that case they were probably taken aback by the response of the listeners, and forced to let Peter Hitchens reply. That plus Peter Hitchens' protests. They realised they had gone too far.

They instinctively recognise that other BBC people like themselves do not really believe that what they are saying is true. For example, imagine a handful of wealthy BBC executives planning a programme to glorify the NHS. Everyone in the room will be fully aware that everyone else in the room has private healthcare insurance. These kinds of things are taken for granted. The fact that their own health insurance negates their arguments is not a source of embarrassment to them. So they all know they need deceit to present their arguments to the masses or their arguments will die, and they recognise each other as deceitful. It never occurs to them for one minute to be ashamed, because they do not regard the truth or reason as things to strive for or value. Only the higher cause is valued - their inner urge to devote their lives to the removal of better people from positions of power and influence, based on inner feelings of hate for these people.

Therefore one programme format they would avoid like a bat avoids light is one where one side has editorial control to make a programme one week, then the other side replies the next week, then the first side again for the third week. There is no better way to be fair - to let both sides speak. The closest to this was when Channel 4 made an AGW-sceptical programme, followed by the BBC giving the AGW believers' side, followed by Channel 4 giving the sceptics reply - only joking, the debate ended after the BBC's reply with the BBC shouting and screaming hysterically about legal action and complaining to Ofcom about the Channel 4 programme.

I agree that there should be a campaign to stop paying the BBC license fee.
First the TV license detector vans do not exist.
Secondly the BBC cannot enter your home unless you invite them in, no court has given the BBC right of entry into a home to check for a TV. Unless they can prove you have a TV ( receiver to be more accurate ) they cannot prosecute you.
If you make sure your TV is hidden from view and cannot be heard from outside you will only be caught if you allow the snoops from the BBC in. I have many friends that have not paid the license for many years. Yes, they get threatening letters only because the BBC cannot believe that nobody today doesn't have a TV.
I say the above with some confidence as I know somebody that had the job of trying to detect non license payers, if they didn't let him in he went away.

I first noticed the bias in the BBC and media as a whole during the 84 / 85 miners strike. A trick of the media then was to report negatively on the strike inbetween bad news stories. A favourite was burying the strike news in between IRA killing and bombing attacks thus subliminally linking the two as bad as one another.
The reports of deaths of people in Libya by unamed and unseen Lybian faces who's stories are reported as fact is of course not proven.
We have been regularly shown shaky phone camera footage of 'riots and violence' from Gaddafy's soldiers, however if you watch closely ( unless I have missed something ) you will see that there was more violence and fires started in the SWP led students riots in our capital, could not 'regimes' anti British not have shown this footage to it's own people.....' look the British government is falling here's the proof thousands attacking govrnment buildings' etc etc.
What I find so terrible is that I would suspect that yes Gaddafy has killed people but I can't believe the worst of him because the BBC etc tell me I should. Only today on Radio Two we were told that tens of thousands have been killed. Where is the proof?.
I need proof of everything now before I believe any news story, and of course the best proof is video, which is so far lacking from our media.

However, I think the real reason that Jeff Randall and Andrew Neil are excluded from decent political slots at the BBC is because neither of them went to Oxbridge.

It's very important for the BBC's authority to go unquestioned. There is a suffocating convention in this country that if someone attended Oxford or Cambridge university they are held to be intelligent, no matter how much their performance in public life indicates otherwise. Boris Johnson is a philandering buffoon who makes reference to "pickaninnies with watermelon smiles" and unsupportable generalisations about entire cities. Yet while we're allowed to call John Prescott an idiot, the equally idiotic Bojo is immune from such observations. Likewise, we're not allowed to call our hopeless Foreign Office mandarins stupid, even though their performance in Libya has been appalling. Nor are we allowed to question the intellect of David Cameron or Nick Clegg, despite their disastrous betrayal of the people who actually elected them.

By the same token, we're supposed to think that senior BBC political journalists, Oxbridge educated to a man, are far too intelligent to be biased, bias being an intellectual failure to recognise one's own cultural prejudices.

It would be difficult, for me anyway, to produce a more smug, self satisfied diatribe than that produced by Stephen Finn. The worrying thing is that the BBC, in a time of financial stringency, finds it necessary to send a whole tribe of reporters to Egypt; now no BBC personnel are being allowed in Lybia, but we do not seem to lack information. Even on local news when some insignificant event occurs, two reporters are sent, one to introduce the piece (which could just as well be done from the studio), and one to make the actual report.
I fear the BBC will cut in all the wrong places to preserve all the news boys and girls in their extremely well paid jobs.
Also is the rather poor coverage of natural disasters in Australia and latterly in New Zealand, in comparison with other parts of the world justified? Or is that a sympton of some kind of bias?

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